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Portland Housing Growth and Opportunity Analysis

As PHB continues to expand and refine our reach into the community, we are striving to understand how place affects our work. We know who we serve. We now are looking more closely at where we invest to meet the needs of those we serve.

Place matters. Neighborhoods with access to amenities such as healthy food, quality education, employment, transportation and community shape our collective success. Unfortunately, these assets are not distributed evenly throughout Portland. Often, low-income households and communities of color are forced by the housing market to live in neighborhoods lacking in these amenities which translates to decreased access to opportunities.

Portland’s Opportunity Maps provide a new look at Portland, through the lens of access to transportation, family wage jobs via transit, childhood education, and healthy eating and active living. These maps paint a stark picture of the concentration of assets in some neighborhoods, and the lack in others, reflecting the lived experience of many low-income Portlanders and disproportionately, communities of color.

PHB is using these maps to inform our investment decisions through our annual Notice of Funding Availability, program Requests for Proposals and policy creation. PHB continues to work with our partner bureaus our collective understanding of opportunity in Portland how our public investments shape our neighborhoods.

As part of efforts to evaluate potential gentrification impacts, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) contracted with Dr. Lisa Bates to prepare a paper on how to assess vulnerability of different neighborhoods to increased gentrification pressure. Although gentrification can also have impacts on businesses or commercial space, this research focuses on the risks for residential displacement. This paper also includes a review of national best practices, including policy tools and programs that Portland could use to mitigate gentrification.

This paper is the starting point for raising questions and a community discussion about what the City of Portland can do about gentrification.